What Was My Mother's Fault Poem by Shifa Chauhan

What was my mother's fault, I ask—
To love, to break, to wear a mask?
To trade her dreams for endless chores,
And bear disgrace behind closed doors,
Where silent tongues and lowered eyes
Turned love to echoes, lost in sighs.

Her firstborn girl, so soft, so small,
Yet she could never stand at all.
Not by her side, not in her name—
She stood against me just the same.

Was it my birth, her silent grief,
A love that left, a fate too brief?
Did she hold me, yet let me go,
A caged bird she could not show?

Tell me, what was her true cost—
A daughter loved, yet somehow lost?